If you still have TTC tokens or paper tickets and day passes waiting to be used, they will soon be worthless as the transit commission will stop accepting them after December 31.
The phase-out of tokens and tickets began in 2019 but were still being sold at retail outlets until March 2023. The deadline was first posted to the TTC website on October 24, about two months before the legacy payment methods expire as legal fare.
Transit advocacy group TTC Riders feels that’s not enough time for users to get on board with the changes and there has not been sufficient public education about them.
“It’s really unfair because people have only been given two months notice to use them. And we would argue not very much notice. The TTC hasn’t made any audio announcements or put up ads. So for a lot of people, this is a huge shock and they’re running out of time to use their tickets and tokens,” said TTC Riders director Shelagh Pizey-Allen.
“I’ve heard from people who are out hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars – people who invested in getting tokens or paper tickets because they thought they would never expire, just like gift cards. And there are rules about gift cards never expiring. Why are TTC tickets and tokens any different?”
The TTC says less than one per cent of riders still use tokens and tickets. Pizey-Allen points out that those customers are often seniors or low-income individuals and families.
“The people who this affects who still have a lot of tokens or tickets are maybe people who aren’t comfortable using online purchasing or loading Presto cards … and people also used to receive tokens and tickets from drop-in centres, ” she said.
She added that many transit users have shared that they have tokens and tickets remaining from the pandemic years when transit service was severely reduced or they had to work from home due to various health policies and closures.
Councillor Jamaal Myers, chair of the TTC Board agrees with Pizey-Allen’s position on all counts.
“I think we could have done a better job in letting people know about this upcoming deadline. Candidly, we haven’t done any advertising except for putting the notice on our website. So unless you have checked our website or you heard it through the news, you wouldn’t know that these were being phased out,” he told CityNews.
He says he will be putting forth a motion at the next TTC Board meeting on Dec. 3 to defer the deadline.
“What my motion is calling for is just to let the public know that this is happening and to figure out a way to give the public the opportunity to use these tokens. You can’t do business without trust. And if your customers bought something in good faith and then all of a sudden without any notice, you’re saying, ‘okay, these items are no longer valid,’ that just breaks trust. And you can’t do business like that,” he said.
“We haven’t put any ads up in our spaces. We haven’t done any formal advertisements in media, including ethnic media where a lot of these ticket holders still are. So we haven’t done our part of the bargain. So my motion is recognizing this and acknowledging this and saying, ‘Okay, let’s do a proper communications rollout and let’s just give people more time to use these tokens.’”
He also agreed that “the people still using tokens and tickets are likely to be disproportionately lower income.”
“They’ve bought these items in bulk as a way to hedge against inflation or rising prices. So they bought these in good faith … it’s a very small percentage, but still, we want to treat these people equitably and do right by them,” he said.
Pizey-Allen also says many riders are selling their tokens and tickets online at a loss because they will not be able to use them up in time. She feels that transit riders should be given the option to exchange their legacy fares for the new Presto tickets or get a refund.
Myers warns potential buyers about counterfeit tokens and tickets and says that an exchange or refund program will not be logistically feasible.
“We did look at refunding tokens, but there was just the administrative burden, for example, of having to validate whether these tokens were real or not. There’s one machine at Hillcrest that does that, so we’d have to figure out a way to get those tokens to the machines and then get the refund back,” he says.
“We also looked at whether or not we could offer a redemption. However, Presto informed us that every redemption that we would offer, there’d still be a five per cent charge and we don’t know when these tokens or tickets were actually purchased. So if they were purchased five years ago, they would’ve been purchased at a different price, but we’d be paying a redemption fee of five per cent at today’s price. So there would be a cost. We don’t know how much the cost is. But we estimate there are about $22 million worth of TTC tokens and tickets outstanding. We don’t expect all of those to be redeemed … but that’s roughly what we know. So we just have to be very careful and fiscally prudent in how we go about this.”
Myers says while his argument to the TTC board will revolve around better informing customers of the changes and an extension to the Dec. 31 deadline, there will still be an end date.
“[People should be allowed to] use them up until a certain point. So the Eglinton Crosstown and the Finch West LRT actually don’t accept tokens or tickets. So those lines, once they come on, people will not be able to use them for tokens and tickets. So I think the fairest way is to figure out the date roughly of when those lines might start and then stop accepting tickets thereafter,” he says.
When pressed for a date, he said it is subject to board approval, but it will not be a prolonged timeline.
“It’s not going be something that’s going to be going on indefinitely. There is a hard deadline … what my motion would do would be to extend that date longer and we haven’t yet decided how long that would be … I doubt it will be a year. We’re looking at months here,” he said.